Political Poems

In the last thirty years of her life, Maxine Kumin bristled at being called “Roberta Frost” because it pegged her as primarily a poet who wrote lyrical nature poems. While it may be true that many of her themes evolved from her life on the farm, her life also included being a voracious reader of the news and keeping up with current world events. She read the New York Times, many news magazines, and watched the PBS News Hour every day that she could. Her world views were also informed by friends and family, especially a daughter who worked for the UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees).

I’ve reached a point in life where it would be easy to let down my guard and write simple imagistic poems. But I don’t want to write poems that aren’t necessary. I want to write poems that matter, that have an interesting point of view.

Specifically in referring to her “Torture Poems” from Still to Mow, she admitted:

Twenty years ago, I thought Denise Levertov was wrong to write political poems, that she would lose her lyrical impulse. But I’ve changed my mind; I didn’t write my poems because I wanted to, they were wrung from me. I had to write them.

Torture Poems

The Torture Poems were first published in Still to Mow in 2007. Maxine revisited the subject in Where I Live and her final collection, And Short the Season. As Maxine stated in The Christian Science Monitor interview, she was deeply concerned that the country was turning “the clock back to the Middle Ages” and her outrage is clearly stated in these powerful poems.

in anguish or rage. To render: to give what is due
or owed. The Pope’s message
this Sunday is the spiritual value of suffering.

Extraordinary how the sun come up
with its rendition of daybreak,
staining the sky with indifference.

from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007

Entering Houses at Night

None of us spoke their language and
none of them spoke ours.
We went in breaking down doors.

They told us to force the whole scrum
—men women kids—into one room.
We went in punching kicking yelling out orders

in our language, not theirs.
The front of one little boy bloomed
wet as we went in breaking down doors.

Now it turns out that 80 percent
of the ones in that sweep were innocent
as we punched kicked yelled out orders.

The way that we spun in that sweltering stink
with handcuffs and blindfolds was rank.
We went in breaking down doors.

Was that the Pyrrhic moment when
we herded the sobbing women with guns
as punching kicking yelling out orders
we went in breaking down doors?

from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007

What You Do

when nobody’s looking
in the black sites what you do
when nobody knows you
are in there what you do

when you’re in the black sites
when you shackle them higher
in there what you do
when you kill by crucifixion

when you shackle them higher
are you still Christian
when you kill by crucifixion
when you ice the body

are you still Christian
when you wrap it is plastic
when you ice the body
when you swear it didn’t happen

when you wrap it is plastic
when the dossier’s been there
when you swear it didn’t happen
for over a year now

when the dossier’s been there
for the ghost prisoner
for over a year now
where nobody’s looking

for the ghost prisoner
when nobody knows what
you do when you’re in there
where nobody’s looking.

from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007

The Beheadings

The guillotine at least was swift. After
the head pitched sideways into a basket
and was raised to a thirsty crowd that roared
approval of death from above, the sun turned
a garish yellow and froze on the horizon
raying out behind the jellied blood the way
it once stood still over Jericho at Joshua’s command
and the day held its breath. . . .

After they sawed through Nicholas Berg’s neck
with an inadequate knife while he screamed,
after the heads of Daniel Pearl
and Paul Johnson were detached
in midthought, in terror but
caught alive on a grainy video, what
did their stored oxygen enable them to mouth,
and Kim-Sun-il who danced his last lines
declaiming over and over on worldwide televisionI don’t want to die what rose from his lips?

It was always night behind the blindfold.
Like bats in midflight at dusk
scrolling their thread messages come
words we can never capture, the soul
perhaps flying out from whatever aperture?
—a pox on belief in the soul!—and yet
there’s no denying we are witness to
something more than
involuntary twitching going on

the air filling with fleeing souls
as it did in 1790, and filling again today
this poem a paltry testimony
to the nameless next and next—
Turks, Bulgarians, Filipinos whose heads
—severed, it is said the head retains
several seconds of consciousness—
will roll, reroll as in revolution
a time of major crustal deformation
when folds and faults are formed

time enough, in several languages
to recite a prayer, compose a grocery list
as the day holds its breath.

from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007

Waterboarding, Restored

Carol Houck Smith 1923-2008

Let’s take this one out, my editor said,
my wise old editor, who rarely invoked
her privilege, two years from now
(it takes that long to go from manuscript
to print) no one will even remember
the word. And so I did.

It began:
You’re thinking summer, theme parks,
a giant plastic slide turquoise and pink,
water streaming down its sinuous course
and clots of screaming children pouring past
in a state of ecstasy, while you sip gin
and tonic with friends.

Now under the shellac
of euphemism they’re calling itenhanced interrogation.
It follows on the heels of extraordinary rendition.
Only the mockingbird is cleverer
Warbling blithe lies from his tree.

Old News

He tended bullet wounds in the teenager’s
Back twice daily in a five-foot square

Crate at a U.S. lockup at Bagram.
The Pentagon defended what was done

To the chained and hooded prisoner
As sanctioned punishment of young Khadr.

The medic didn’t object; chaining was approved.
He borrowed him to translate for other captives.

He didn’t inquire how long they let him hang.
Shackled, the boy soiled himself. Beatings.

Threats of rape. Solitary. Prolonged cold.
It only makes page 6. The news is old.

The New York Times,
May 4, 2010; July 11, 2008

from And Short the Season, W.W. Norton, 2014

Red Tape and Kangaroo Courts I and II

RED TAPE AND KANGAROO COURTS I

On this tropical refrigerated paved-over island
where banana rats are rampant

endangered species iguanas dine on
McDonald’s and Subway discards

and the list of things that are prohibited
in the camps is itself prohibited

—not Kafka but George Clarke, a tax lawyer
working pro bono at Guantanamo

where special clearance and special papers
required to reach this “theater” are months in coming

where Arabic-speaking inmates are pressed to serve
with no skilled translators available

and capital cases are heard with no
capital defense attorneys allowed

RED TAPE AND KANGAROO COURTS II

Soundproof glass between
the accused and observers in the courtroom

shields what cannot be said
what must be interrupted if the detainees

speak of the dark acts at the dark
heart of what took place during their confinement:

for interrogation they held his head in
the toilet and flushed it over and over

for hunger strike they forcefed him until he vomited, then
fed him again until he vomited again

and when he passed out, they doused him awake in a cell
with a steel bunk, no mattress, no blanket

if we don’t talk about the torture
it never happened.

The titles and key phrases embedded in these two Sonnets are excerpted from The Guantanamo Lawyers, Edited by Mark P. Denbeaux and Jonathan Hafetz (New York University Press, 2009).

from And Short the Season, W.W. Norton, 2014

The Pre-Trial Confinement of Private Bradley Manning

To drive a man to suicide you put
Him on suicide watch, you take away
His sheet and pillow, all his clothes except
His underwear, you shine a light in day

And night, you confiscate his eyeglasses,
Then you deny that he’s in solitary.
You say he lives in his own cell. Sightless.
Each day he gets to walk around an empty

Room for an hour. No pushups, no jogging in place.
He’s not the first one held as an example.
Amnesty reports it seeks redress
As month by month both mind and body crumple.

The Marines treat every detainee
Firmly, fairly, and with dignity.

The New York Times, January 26, 2011

from And Short the Season, W.W. Norton, 2014

Social Injustice Poems

The Social (In)justice section below includes poems from the early ‘80’s to her final collection in 2014. Early on she was relating her experience as a young woman during World War II and the dropping of the A-Bombs and life under the threat of a future nuclear war. She touches on various subjects, some ripped straight from the headlines, such as capital punishment, genocide, child rebel soldiers, refugees, a Bulgarian revolutionary poet, and climate change.

Remembering Pearl Harbor at the Tutankhamen Exhibit

Wearing the beard of divinity, King Tut
hunts the hippopotamus of evil.
He cruises the nether world on the back
of a black leopard. And here he has put
on his special pectoral, the one
painted with granulated gold. This will
adorn him as he crosses over.

I shuffle
in line on December seventh to see
how that royal departure took place.
A cast of thousands is passing this way.
No one looks up from the alabaster
as jets crisscross overhead. Our breaths
cloud the cases that lock in the gold
and lapis lazuli.

The Day
of infamy, Roosevelt called it. I was
a young girl listening to the radio
on a Sunday of hard weather. Probably
not one in seven packed in these rooms
goes back there with me.

Implicit
throughout this exhibit arranged
by Nixon and Sadat as heads of state
is an adamantine faith
in total resurrection.
Therefore the king is conveyed
with a case for his heart
and another magnificent
hinged apparatus, far too small,
for his intestines, all in place,
all considered retrievable

whereas if one is to be blown
apart over land or water
back into the Nothingness
that precedes light, it is better
to go with the simplest detail:
a cross, a dogtag,
a clamshell.

from The Retrieval System, Viking/Penguin, 1978

How to Survive Nuclear War

After reading Ibuse’s Black Rain

Brought low in Kyoto,
too sick with chills and fever
to take the bullet train to Hiroshima,
I am jolted out of this geography,
pursued by Nazis, kidnapped, stranded
when the dam bursts, my life
always in someone else’s hands.
Room service brings me tea and aspirin.

This week the Holy Radish
Festival, pure white daikons
one foot long grace all the city’s shrines.
Earlier, a celebration for the souls
of insects farmers may have trampled on
while bringing in the harvest.
Now shall I repent?
I kill to keep whatever
pleases me. Last summer
to save the raspberries
I immolated hundreds of coppery
Japanese beetles.

In some respects,
Ibuse tells me,
radiation sickness is less
terrible than cancer. The hair
comes out in patches. Teeth
break off like matchsticks
at the gum line but the loss
is painless. Burned skin itches,
peels away in strips.
Everywhere the black rain fell
it stains the flesh like a tattoo
but weeks later, when
survivors must expel
day by day in little pisses
the membrane lining the bladder
pain becomes an extreme grammar.

I understand we did this.
I understand
we may do this again
before it is done to us.
In case it is thought of
to do to us.

Just now, the homage that
I could not pay the irradiated dead
gives rise to a dream.
In it, a festival to mourn
the ritual maiming of the ginkgo,
pollarding that lops
all natural growth
from the tumorous stump
years of pruning creates.
I note that these faggots
are burned. I observe that the smoke
is swallowed with great ceremony.
Thereupon every severed shoot
comes back, takes on
a human form, fan-shaped,
ancient, all-knowing,
tattered like us.

This meanswe are all to be rescued.

Though we eat animals
and wear their skins,
though we crack mountains
and insert rockets in them

this signifieswe will burn and go up.
We will be burned and come back.

I wake naked, parched,
my skin striped by sunlight.
Under my window
a line of old ginkgos hunkers down.
The new sprouts that break from
their armless shoulders are
the enemies of despair.

from The Long Approach, Viking, 1985

Photograph, U.S. Army Flying School, College Park, Maryland, 1909

Wilbur Wright is racing the locomotive
on the Baltimore and Ohio commuter line.
The great iron horse hisses and hums on its rails
but the frail dragonfly overhead appears to be winning.
Soon we will have dog fights and the Red Baron.
The firebombing of Dresden is still to come.
And the first two A-bombs, all that there are.

The afterburners of jets lie far in the future
and the seeds of our last descendants, who knows,
are they not yet stored in their pouches?

from Nurture, Viking/Penguin, 1989

Identifying the Disappeared

The exiles have returned from safe cold places
with their resistance to forgetting, returned
with brush and spoon, sieve and dustpan
to bring back the bones of a child, which are become
the bones of a nesting bird; the lip of a clavicle
transformed into angel wings which want to be
its mother; skulls for uncle, father, brother
who soiled themselves and died in the Resistance.

It is another day to walk about
testing the earth for springy places to insert
their tools, another day to see what the dead
saw in that instant after the machete
severed the critical artery,
after the eye went milky and the soul
flew away in horror and the flesh retreated
in narrow strips, like ribbons, from the bone.
The exiles have come back. They are breaking
the sleep of earth, they are packing the dry shards
of the disappeared in cardboard cartons
Relief provides—wood is scarce here—
and still they store up the names of the murderers
who have put away their uniforms and persuasions
under the landmine of respectability,
the trigger, God willing, one day they will trip on.

from The Long Marriage, W.W. Norton, 2001

Capital Punishment

On the way to his death Benny Demps
complained about what had happened
backstage: when they couldn’t raise a vein
in either arm they went to his groin
which also refused to yield and then
cut his leg open. It was bloody
said the 10 o’clock news on TV
but they finally made connection.

We are shown only the flat
uninhabited metal stretcher
but as the black curtain oozed upward
Benny went on calling for justice
from his tidy blue-sheeted gurney
demanding an investigation
into the pain they had caused him
the botch they had made of his exit.

Now we are given pictures
of victims in Sierra Leone.
The thing about the machete
is how quickly bone and gristle
will dull it, how often
you have to sit down and hone it
to hack off those hundreds of limbs
above or below the elbow.

One village elder was spared his thumbs.
On camera he holds out his arms
to show us what you can do
with two thumbs. Some
of the armless dripping blood
ran into the bush after their attackers
crying, come back, I implore you!
Come back and kill us, please kill us.

The newscast goes blank. Silver
streaks jitter across the screen
which finally fills with merciful snow.
Why are we shown mutilations
and denied execution? I long
to go back and hear out Benny Demps
taxing this vengeful world of slash
and burn and inject, I want

to be there for the last act
in his ruthless life, the scene
we were not permitted to witness,
his naïve six-minute diatribe
against the state, the vitriol
of his soliloquy running down
like a windup toy:
the gentleness of his exit.

Mulching

prostrate before old suicide bombings, starvation,
AIDS, earthquakes, the unforeseen tsunami,
front-page photographs of lines of people

with everything they own heaped on their heads,
the rich assortment of birds trilling on all
sides of my forest garden, the exhortations

of commencement speakers at local colleges,
the first torture revelations under my palms
and I a helpless citizen of a country

I used to love, who as a child wept when
the brisk police band bugled Hat’s off! The flag
is passing by, now that every wanton deed

in this stack of newsprint is heartbreak,
my blackened fingers can only root in dirt,
turning up industrious earthworms, bits

of unreclaimed eggshells, wanting to ask
the earth to take my unquiet spirit,
bury it deep, make compost of it.

from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007

On Reading The Age of Innocence in a Troubled Time

I read this curious Victorian novel
in the suspended bliss of a mid-July night.
Moths storm the screen, longing to plaster
their frail dust against the single bulb
that lights my page. It’s 1870,
Old New York. Under the orange tree
Newland Archer kisses his fiancée,
May Welland, for only the second time
in their prescribed courtship and presses down
too hard in his ardor. As Edith Wharton tells it,the blood rose to her face and she
drew back as if he had startled her.

Reading in bed before sleep, the luxury
of entering another world as if from above. . . .
I set it against the realities
of the breakfast table’s news. Today
the New York Times unravels
the story of Mukhtaran Bibi, a Pakistani
woman who was raped as retribution
for something her younger brother
was said to have done, while the tribesmen
danced for joy. Gang rape. The definition,several attackers in rapid succession,
in no way conveys the fervor,
the male gutturals, the raw juice as
the treasured porcelain of her vagina
was shattered. Splintered again and again.
And after, to be jeered at.
The shame of it.

What could Wharton’s good virgin say
to this illiterate, courageous survivor
who dared to press charges?

— As if in her day
there were no tender girls turned prostitutes,
no desperate immigrants, no used-up carthorses
beaten to the pavement, their corpses
ravaged by dogs in Old New York. Look away,
May Welland! Turn aside as best you can.
Even defended from life on the streets,
from all that was turbulent, ragged and rough,
even unacknowledged, May, history repeats.
You must have seen enough.

from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007

The Map of Need

On my laptop, terse as a police log,
the monthly list of where
the equine investigator’s gone

and in my lap, a catalog
of child amputees, photos where
the darling arm is gone,

December. Three horses barely able to stand
—even the hard-nosed sheriff concurs—
are trailered to hay, water, welcome.

Relief work’s always moment to moment.
How wide is the map of need? Measure
the bellies enlarged on bark and roots, the maimed,

in the merciless heat and yet it soldiers on,
this rage, this will to live consumes, abides
wherever flesh is: everyone.

from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007

Revisionist History: The British Uganda Program of 1903

A paradise in Africa?
How generous of the British
to offer a new Jerusalem
to the conference of Zionists,

an ample chunk of fertile land
to plow and plant, that the wandering
Jews might wander no more.

Dispatched, the three-man delegation
returned wild-eyed with tales
of lions, leopards, elephants
roaming the yellow veldt at will.

Also a warrior tribe, the Masai,
handsome as statues, whose cattle, given
to them by God, are their Torah.

In the words of Theodor Herzl:The natives are to be gently
persuaded to move to other lands.
So far, this is history.

But what if the Masai,
Proud lion hunters, laid down
their spears, became willing partners?

First a trickle, then a torrent.
They came with wheelbarrows, seeds and hoes.
The proud Masai helped gather cow patties,
watched as these Jewish blacksmiths and tailors

devoutly turned them under the soil,
watched as grasslands gave way to gardens
heavy with peas, cabbages, melon.

What if the Jews grew browner,
the Masai grew paler until
the plateau was all café au lait?

To fatten the cattle the Jew raised alfalfa.
The Tribe of Masai ate eggplants and greens.
They blessed each other’s Torahs. Amen.
The wandering Jews wandered no more.

from Still to Mow, W.W. Norton, 2007

With William Meredith in Bulgaria

In the grim days of Zhivkov, President for Life,
you and I flew to Sofia in an old Russian Tupelov
where everyone smoked and coughed and spat
and over each window hung a little box marked
in English and Cyrillic in case of emergency
safety rope. Laughing, we said sky hook, but when
on landing they took away our passports and return
tickets, fear whistled down my throat. You,

ever equable, assured me that as our country’s
goodwill ambassadors at the harvest festival
to honor Nikola Vaptsarov, we were safe as sunrise.Vaptsar, they called him, this war-hero poet
and factory machinist martyred in the Resistance.
Homegrown fascists dispatched him in 1942
but not before he flung the plume of revolution
at them. He survives as a park, boulevard, museum.

They bused us into his beloved mountains
where girls with fruit and flowers offered
ripe pears the size of platters, so succulent
that one bite sluiced our chins. Everyone
in peasant dress, all reds and greens, and endless
speeches. No one mentioned Vaptsarov’s life story,
how his countrymen had hung him upside down
for hours and beaten him with rifle butts

before they assembled the firing squad. Because
you were gay and in the closet (this was the seventies)
you leaned your shoulder against mine in public
and squeezed my hand to stay awake through the rhetoric.
Nightly your new artist buddy Misha
hoped to be invited to your college.
Nightly we three drank to this with slivovitz
and Ludmilla, our interpreter, who did not drink,

who once had served for the Lord Mayor of London
and wanted help with amerikanski slang, raised
a dry glass. They took her from us the fourth day,
I said it was because we’d been too friendly.
You disagreed. Misha pulled away and fell silent.
Two more days of speeches, nights of parties
and then the hairpin turns back down the mountains
made queasier by hangover. The firing squad.

And then the worms, Nikola wrote the night before
his execution. I fell. Someone else will take my place.
Balkan Airlines’ engines throbbed, the door
was latched, we had already fastened our seatbelts
but how could we go? Sit tight, you said,
as if we could do anything else. The plane pulsed
angrily. The heavy seal gave way, a functionary galloped
down the aisle restoring our identities, our passports.

from Where I live, New & Selected Poems 1990-2010, W.W. Norton, 2010

Going Down

They call it climigration, these
experts on vast shoreline loss
and islands swept by rising seas.

So far it’s minimal. In Papua
New Guinea, a string of seven atolls
are awash. Three thousand souls

are being relocated to a
famous island, Bougainville,
wrested from Japan in World War II.

The tundra that protects the Eskimo
village of Newtok from the Bering Sea
is gradually eroding as the glue

of permafrost beneath it thaws
and arctic water levels rise.
They’re going down and so